LONDON — Gaspard Ulliel, a star of French cinema greatest recognized outdoors his native nation for portraying the younger Hannibal Lecter in “Hannibal Rising” and the style designer Yves Saint Laurent in “Saint Laurent,” died on Wednesday, the day after a snowboarding accident in France. He was 37.
Mr. Ulliel’s household confirmed his dying in a statement to Agence France-Presse, the French information service.
Roselyne Bachelot, France’s tradition minister, was among the many many French political and cultural figures to pay tribute to him. “His sensitivity and the depth of his appearing made Gaspard Ulliel an distinctive actor,” Ms. Bachelot said on Twitter. “Cinema at present loses an immense expertise.”
His dying, from a head damage in accordance with the French press, comes simply weeks earlier than Mr. Ulliel is about to look in Marvel’s “Moon Knight” sequence for Disney+, scheduled to debut March 30.
Mr. Ulliel was born in a suburb of Paris on Nov. 25, 1984 and whereas nonetheless a youngster, appeared in quite a few French TV reveals and flicks. He studied cinema at a college in Paris, however advised The New York Instances’s T Journal in a 2010 interview that he needed to drop out as a result of his appearing profession took off. A return to directing was “nonetheless in my thoughts,” he stated. In the identical interview he talked of his love for snowboarding, saying “Half my household comes from the French Alps. As a toddler, I virtually skied earlier than I walked.”
His rise globally got here together with his first main film position in 2003’s “Strayed,” a movie set in wartime France, the place he performed an itinerant teenager serving to a girl fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris. Karen Durbin, writing in The New York Times, stated he was the “scene stealer” of the movie. “He appears absolutely arrived, displaying us the sides of a posh and mercurial character like a blackjack vendor shuffling a deck of playing cards,” she wrote.
For the efficiency, he was nominated for a César award, France’s model of the Oscars.
Mr. Ulliel grew to become extra recognized to audiences in the USA in 2007 when he took the lead in “Hannibal Rising,” the prequel to “The Silence of the Lambs,” taking part in Hannibal Lecter as an oddly sympathetic, if nonetheless horribly murderous, character. The movie obtained combined opinions. Jeannette Catsoulis, writing in The New York Times, stated Mr. Ulliel “by no means hardens into a real horror.”
However he received extra unanimous reward for later movies reminiscent of “Saint Laurent” and “To The Ends of The World,” a conflict movie set in Vietnam. A.O. Scott, reviewing “Saint Laurent” in The New York Times, stated that Mr. Ulliel portrayed the designer Yves Saint Laurent as by no means experiencing a second of doubt all through his profession, “conveying a haunting, quietly charismatic combination of sensitivity and coldness,” Mr. Scott wrote.
Mr. Ulliel was nominated for the “greatest actor” award on the Césars for his efficiency in “Saint Laurent,” an award he received in 2016 for his efficiency in Xavier Dolan’s “It’s Only the End of the World,” through which he performed a prizewinning author who comes residence to inform his household he’s dying.
Suitably for somebody who portrayed one in every of trend’s largest icons, Mr. Ulliel additionally moved within the trend world, having appeared on the duvet of French Vogue and fronting a marketing campaign for the scent Bleu de Chanel.
No speedy particulars had been out there on Mr. Ulliel’s survivors.
